How Much Does a Website Cost for a Small Business in 2026?

"How much is a website?" sounds like a simple question, and the honest answer is that it depends on who builds it, how big it is and who looks after it once it's live. A five-page site for a new landscaper in Chalfont and a 40-page site for an HVAC company covering Bucks and Montgomery counties are both "small business websites." They don't cost the same.

Here is what each route costs in 2026, what you'll pay every year after launch and how to read a quote.

The four ways to get a website

Build it yourself on a website builder

Wix, Squarespace and WordPress.com let you pick a template, drag in your text and photos and publish. You pay a monthly or yearly plan that includes hosting. The cost is low in dollars and high in hours: expect to spend 20 to 40 hours on a first site if you've never built one.

Good for: brand-new businesses, tight budgets and owners who like doing it themselves.

Hire a freelancer

A freelancer builds the site for a fixed fee or an hourly rate. Prices vary more here than anywhere else. On Upwork, the global freelance marketplace, the median hourly rate for web designers is $21. A US-based designer with a local portfolio usually charges well above that, since the US Bureau of Labor Statistics puts the median pay of web developers and digital designers at $47.85 an hour before any business overhead.

Good for: a straightforward site when you already have the words and photos ready.

Hire an agency

An agency brings design, writing, search setup and ongoing support under one roof. You pay more than a solo freelancer, but you're not relying on one person's calendar, and the site is usually planned around how customers search, with a page for each service and town.

Good for: businesses that depend on calls from Google and want the site to keep earning after launch.

Custom-built software

Customer portals, quoting tools, logins or integrations with your scheduling or accounting software push a project into custom development. These projects are scoped one by one and can run well into five figures. Most local service businesses don't need this to start.

Website prices at a glance

Option	What you pay	Source
Squarespace plans	$19 to $99 a month, billed yearly	Squarespace pricing page
Wix plans	About $17 to $159 a month, billed yearly	Wix plans page (US prices)
WordPress.com plans	$4 to $45 a month, billed yearly	WordPress.com pricing page
Freelance web designer	$21 an hour median, most between $15 and $30	Upwork
US web developers and designers	$47.85 an hour median pay	US Bureau of Labor Statistics
.com domain (wholesale)	$10.26 a year, rising to $10.97 on November 1, 2026	Verisign, via Domain Name Wire
CouncilSoft website build	From $1,500	Our pricing page
CouncilSoft maintenance	From $149 a month	Our pricing page

Prices as of October 2026. Retail domain prices are higher than wholesale because each registrar adds its own margin.

The costs that keep coming

The build is a one-time cost. These come every year:

• Domain name. Usually $15 to $25 a year for a .com at retail. Renewal prices are often higher than the first-year deal, so check both.
• Hosting. Included in builder plans. For a self-hosted WordPress site, it's a separate bill that ranges from a few dollars a month for basic shared hosting to $30 or more for managed hosting.
• Maintenance. Software updates, backups, security checks and small edits. On a builder, the platform does the software part. On WordPress, someone has to do it every month, which is what our website maintenance plans cover.
• Content. New pages, seasonal photos and updated prices. A site that never changes slowly falls behind the competitor who adds a page a month.
• Email. Business email at your own domain is usually a separate subscription per person.

What pushes the price up

• Number of pages. A page for each service and each town you serve is how local businesses show up for searches like "drain cleaning Newtown." Ten services across eight towns adds up fast.
• Who writes the words. Copywriting from scratch is often the biggest single line in a quote.
• Photos. Real photos of your team and your work beat stock photos, and a half-day shoot costs extra.
• Booking, payments or a store. Online scheduling, deposits and product catalogs add setup and testing.
• Moving from an old site. If you already rank for anything, the move needs redirects and care. Our guide to website redesign costs covers what that involves.
• Accessibility and speed. Building to accessibility practices and Google's speed targets takes skill, and it's worth paying for.

Three budgets for the same business

Here's a hypothetical. A two-truck plumbing company in Warminster wants a site that brings in calls from Warminster, Warrington, Hatboro and Horsham.

• The DIY route. The owner spends three weekends on a Squarespace Core plan at $29 a month, writes a home page, one services page and a contact page. Year-one cost: about $350 plus the domain and those weekends. It looks fine, but there's no page for water heaters or drain cleaning and none for the four towns.
• The freelancer route. A designer builds eight pages for $2,000 from text the owner supplies. Better, but the owner still writes everything and calls the designer for each change.
• The agency route. A 20-page site with a page for each core service and each town, written for the searches people use, with the Google profile linked up properly. Higher upfront, and built to bring in calls rather than just look tidy.

None of these is wrong. The right one depends on how much of your work comes from Google and how much time you have.

What our websites cost

Our websites start at $1,500. Every build is mobile-first, has a page for each service and town you serve, uses clean structured data so Google and AI assistants can read it, and includes an llms.txt file. You own the domain and every login from day one. Care plans start at $149 a month, and every price is on our pricing page.

The exact number depends on page count, how much of the writing we do and whether you take bookings or payments online. After a free audit, you get a written quote.

Questions to ask before you sign

• Who owns the domain, the hosting account and the site files?
• Can we edit text and photos ourselves without calling anyone?
• Does the price include writing, or do we supply all the content?
• Will there be a page for each service and each town we serve?
• What happens to the site if we stop paying for support?
• What does the yearly cost look like after launch, all in?

If you're still deciding on a platform, our honest comparison of Wix, Squarespace and WordPress walks through cost, search control and who owns what. And if the site is meant to bring in local calls, it pays to know what local SEO costs too, since the two work together.

What to do next

Before you spend anything, find out what's holding your current site and Google profile back. Our free visibility audit checks your site speed, your pages and how you show up in your town, and comes with a written quote if you want one.